Napalm & Silly Putty
by George Carlin

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Summary of Napalm & Silly Putty

Spending more than 15 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in hardcover, George Carlin, the thinking person's comic, has made it very clear how successful he is at the transition from stage to page. In Napalm & Silly Putty, Carlin's characteristically ironic and hilarious take on life shines through. He asks:

How can it be a spy satellite if they announce on TV that it's a spy satellite?

Why do they bother saying "raw sewage"?

Do some people cook that stuff?

In the expression "topsy-turvy," what exactly is meant by "turvy"?

He can do an extended bit too, most memorably the transcript of Jesus on a talk show plugging his new tell-all memoir about the Trinity, Three's a Crowd. Carlin is funny, but genuinely angry and poignant at times: "You live 80 years and at best you get about six minutes of pure magic," he says. Sad, but about right.

And how did Carlin get into his line of business, "thinking up goofy s---," as he puts it? There's a clue in one entry in this book: "As of 1995 the number of people who had lived on earth was 105,472,380,169 ... it means that at this point there have been almost 1 quadrillion human bowel movements and most of them occurred before people had anything to read. These are the kind of thoughts that kept me from moving quickly up the corporate ladder."

Thank god Carlin stayed low on the corporate food chain and high on his own utterly idiosyncratic ideas! --Tim Appelo

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